


The Boy Who Cried Wolf

by Scrunchles



Series: The BLU Pack [1]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Gen, Painful Change, Scout is a little shit, permanent death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-28 19:21:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5102687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrunchles/pseuds/Scrunchles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of Halloween pranks causes the RED team to no longer believe Scout's attention seeking lies about supernatural happenings on the base.</p><p>Just in time for him to get bitten by a werewolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

No organization was worth being a part of if it didn’t have stories behind it.  Most of them were told by Demo on nights when everyone was just drunk enough to be interested around an eerily flickering fire with the occasional scuffle of a desert animal coming out to hunt.

Scout took them a little too seriously—though, on the other hand, perhaps he didn’t take them seriously enough.

“Oh geeze!  You guys, there’s a fucking TentaSpy in the sewers!”  Scout bleated, running full tilt through the base.  He stopped so fast when he passed the common room that his feet slipped out from under him and he fell with a graceless “oomph!”

“What’re you yelling about, Scout?”  Sniper asked, looking over his shades at the boy and raising a brow.

“There’s.  A fucking.  TentaSpy.  In the sewer!  I saw it with my own eyes, man!”

Engineer didn’t look convinced, but Demoman shot Sniper a perplexed look.

“Grab your rifle, lad.”  Demoman told Sniper as he heaved himself off of the couch and walked solemnly toward the door, like a man going to war.

Sniper sighed and shut off the TV before standing and following Demoman.  Engineer reluctantly followed Sniper, still looking unconvinced.

“Didn’t Demo just tell us that story night before last…?”

“Shhh, not now, laddie.  _Speak_  of evil, and it will  _appear_.”  Demoman told the Texas tinkerer in the most serious voice he’d ever heard from the Scot.

Scout bounced around, leading the way.  He jabbered on about his heroic feat, about how he barely escaped the sharp claws, and the disgusting, slick arms the creature had.

Before they even got to the edge of the moat, they could hear a steady, deep, rattling growl coming up over the drop off.  All three men hesitated, but Scout continued to creep forward.  He glanced over the edge and gave a shriek before falling in.

“Scout!”  Sniper and Demoman rushed forward with Engineer close behind.  Sniper hadn’t gotten his gun, but he had his kukri strapped to his back.  It was already out of its sheath and ready to hack away any slippery limbs when he and Demoman paused at the edge. 

In the water, there was what was obviously a straw sack dummy in the water, outfitted with their Spy’s uniform and mask.  There was an ugly, toothy frown magic markered onto the opening in the mask for the mouth and the eyes were just two small black dots in the middle of the eyeholes.  The water was already invading the sack, and the little dummy bobbed lower with every wave that Scout thrashed on it, still squealing like a stuck pig.

“Oh God, it’s got me, help!”  He screamed, wrapped in what appeared to be a pantleg of Spy’s suit.  Sewn to another pant leg.  There were other such tendrils snaking out from the center mass of the dummy, and they oscillated in the water.

“Well we know he’s full of it.”  Sniper said, sheathing his kukri again and crossing his arms.  “But how are the arms moving?”

“Probably that noise we hear—the vacuum set on reverse.”  Engineer shrugged and turned to walk back to the base.  He was missing reruns of I Love Lucy for these shenanigans.

Scout continued to flail below, even as his teammates left him.  Sniper followed Engineer back with a huff of disgust, and Demoman merely watched the boy for a moment more before turning away and slowly trekking back to the base.

It took Scout several moments to realize that he wasn’t being watched anymore, and, even then, he slowly, slowly stopped his screaming and carrying on.

“Well, I had ‘em for a little while.”  Scout mumbled before swimming over to turn off the vacuum.  He unplugged it and started packing up his daisy chain of extension cords of various sizes.

He’d get them real good next time.

:::::

Halloween was the best time to trick his teammates.

“Oh God!”  Scout whined as he slumped around a corner. They were at harvest, it was dark and creepy, and anything could happen.

“M-Medic…” he whimpered, holding his forearm tight.

It didn’t take the doctor long to show up, and the sight of the German kneeling next to Scout instead of standing and healing him caused several other team members to stop as well.

“I got bit by something, man…” Scout told Medic, red dripping bright between his fingers.

“Let me look—what could possibly have bitten you out here?”  Medic pried Scout’s hand off his arm and his nose wrinkled in disgust.  “ _Scheisse_ , is that human?”  Medic asked, less disgusted by the sight of the wound and more concerned with who would  _want_  to bite  _Scout_.

“No… no, man, it’s fuckin’… It’s a fuckin’  _zombie_   _bite_.”  Scout’s eyes were big as saucers and Medic pursed his lips at the thought.

“Can’t you just heal it up, Doc?”  Sniper asked nervously.

“ _Nien_ , that would just seal the infection in… I could amputate, but it would need to be right now.”

“Dude, you’re not taking my fucking arm!”

“What about respawn?”  Demoman suggested, shifting nervously so that Sniper was between himself and his injured teammate.

“That might just exacerbate—“

Scout’s brains exploded out the back of his head, and everyone looked in shock to the enemy Soldier who had crept up on them while they argued.

“What?  It’s  _obvious_.  If the infection has spread, respawn won’t recognize the body as your Scout’s and Zack can’t ‘live’ without a brain.”  He snorted and jacked another shell into the chamber just as Sniper and Demoman recovered from their shock.  Sniper took a shotgun blast to the stomach, and Medic put Demoman between himself and the Soldier as the Scot started unleashing pills at the man.

No one noticed Scout’s body disappear into respawn or saw the boy dart in and brain the resilient Soldier with his bat.  The man hit the ground, and Scout continued bashing.

“Shoot,” hit, “me in,” meaty thud, “the face,” smack, “again,” sickening squelch, “bitch!”  Scout didn’t stop hitting the Soldier until Sniper punched him across the jaw.

“Ow, hey!”  Scout whined, holding his face and glaring up at the man.

“You’d better stop this shit while you still have a head, Scout.  I’m bloody serious, mate.  One more ridiculous stunt, and I’ll have Medic put your head on a battery like he did with the BLU Spy!”  Sniper growled, poking Scout in the forehead with his toe as he walked past and mounted the stairs to get a decent perch.

“Whatever, dumb kangaroo loving—ow!”  Scout squealed as he was bonked in the head with Demoman’s glass scrumpy bottle.

“I’m just as serious as Sniper.”  The Scot told Scout, narrowing his eye.  “One more time, boyo.  Superstition isn’t to be taken lightly.”

“Whatever…” Scout muttered, rubbing his head.  “You thought it was funny, right, Medic?”  Scout asked, turning to the man.

“Ah… actually, I was thinking of how I could best justify allowing you to change and then strapping you down in my lab to dissect you.  But, yes, it was very… funny… Scout.”  Medic smiled what Scout was sure seemed like a harmless smile to anyone who hadn’t heard his first sentence.

“Oh… ‘kay, I’m not going to pull that one ever again.”  He mumbled while standing.

“Out of curiosity, Scout, how  _did_  you get that bite?”  Medic asked, cocking his head to the side.

“Oh, I was tussling with their Sniper, and he kind of bit me?  I thought it was really weird, but, y’know, not something above a crazy bushman, right?”  Scout rolled his eyes and snorted.

“Hm… I suppose.”  Medic nodded and shrugged before walking away.

The next few days were… strange for Scout.  He alternated between spiking a fever and feeling terrible to feeling obscenely good while still feverish.  Sometimes he felt more energetic, like he’d had a Bonk!, and, alternately, a few minutes later feel like he’d rather just lay down on the floor and quit living.

It wasn’t until he’d started itching that he decided to see Medic.

“It just feels like a bunch of fucking ants are crawling all over me…” he complained, rubbing his arms, as Medic had warned him not to scratch.

“Well, I see no change in your physiology from the outside… if you’d like for me to look a little deeper, I will, of course, need the proper forms signed stating—“

“You are  _not_  opening me up again.”  Scout shook his head and jumped off of the examination table.  “Can’t you just… give me something for it?”

“Scout, I cannot give you ‘something’ and not know what is wrong with you.  Giving you  _anything_  might make it worse.”

“Ugh, whatever.  It’ll probably… pass or something.”  Scout growled, scratching his arm as he turned to leave.

“Scout… precisely when did this start?”  Medic asked curiously.

“Like a few days ago.”  Scout paused at the door and crossed his arms.  “Why?”

“It’s nothing… try to get some rest, yes?  You might just be jittery and need sleep.”

“Yeah, sure.”  Scout mumbled, scratching at the invisible legion of bugs scuttling over his skin.

When he returned to his room, Scout felt a wave of heat wash over him, and his mouth throbbed with a sudden, intense pain.

“Holy… shit…” he hissed, unable to open his mouth any wider for fear of the pain intensifying.  The bugs seemed to move from the top of his skin to below, and Scout gripped his arms, ready to tear his skin off.  He glanced in the mirror and saw a pair of yellow eyes staring back at him just as the scuttling bug-feeling turned into  _biting_  bug-feeling.

“What the…” he saw fur sprouting before his eyes in the mirror, but his arms were still clean.  A tail swished behind his reflection, but all he felt was an insistent throb above his ass, like when he’d fallen out of the tree in the park and hit his tailbone hard.

“ _Oh my God_.”  Scout turned and rushed out of his room.

“Guys!”  He cried, despite the pain in his jaw.  Tears slid from his eyes as he ran into the common room where almost half of the team was gathered.  “You guys remember how I got bitten by the other team’s Sniper?!”

“Yeah, and pretended it was a zombie bite.  Who could forget that?”  Demoman grumbled and took a long pull on his bottle.

“Yeah, well it wasn’t a zombie bite—it was a fucking  _werewolf_   _bite_.”  Scout keened, hopping from one foot to the other and rubbing his arms compulsively.  His nose started to burn, and he wondered if it would begin elongating soon.

That must be what he was feeling, the change or whatever it was.  It would make him a monster.

What if he hurt someone?  What if he bit someone?

Scout looked around desperately at the unamused faces surrounding him.

“You… you don’t believe me?!”  Scout asked incredulously, practically dancing in place.  “The other team’s Sniper is a  _fuckin’ werewolf_!  He  _bit_ me!”

“Why should we?  All you’ve done in the past is play stupid jokes on us.”  Sniper told Scout from his place on the couch.  Heavy and Spy were playing cards in the corner, and seemed to be at least entertained by the discussion that Sniper and Demoman were having with Scout.

“I cannot believe that he thinks they would buy a werewolf gag.”  Spy commented to Heavy, scoffing at the very idea as he discarded two cars and took two from the deck.

“It’s  _not_!  It’s  _not_  a gag, I’m going to fucking change into a… into a big ass wolfman, and… and…”  Scout looked around the faces turned to him, and then there was Heavy’s back. 

No one cared.  No one believed him.  He was just the boy who cried “wolf.”

Scout felt a wave of heat run through him again, and all the different pains he’d felt in the past few days hit him tenfold.  He turned and ran out the door, howling in anguish.

His teammates turned back to their tasks, Demoman and Sniper sharing a roll of their eyes.

Scout hit the dusty ground outside the base at a run.  If he could get far enough away, he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone, right?

Another wave of pain followed the previous just as the spiking sharpness of it started to dull.  His hips began to ache, and he bowed forward, cupping his arms around his middle with a desperate sob.  It felt better that way, and when the pain passed, his hands went down into the dust. 

It was easier to run like that.

The itching and biting had intensified to fiery little pinpricks in every pore, and Scout swore he could feel his ears migrating to the top of his head.  His skull ached worse than when the enemy Scout gotten a good hit in with his bat, and it wasn’t until he tasted blood that he noticed his jaw was aching again as his teeth lengthened and sharpened into deadly weapons.  His chest expanded and his shirt ripped.  His pants hurt, and the pain of his tailbone growing with nowhere to go made him see stars.

He tripped once, and rolled across several meters of dust before just lying there, panting and whining as something fought with him in his mind.  He just wanted the pain to go away, he just wanted it all to end.  He felt sharp nails dig into his palm when he clenched his fist, and he reached back to rip his pants, just to relieve the pressure.

A minute relief in another wave of nausea and bone-deep agony.

Scout vomited, convulsed, tried to fight against the pain rolling over him.  His muscles seized and spasmed into foreign shapes.  His mouth ached and bled with the strange new set of teeth.  His ears heard creaks and cracks of his bones breaking and setting into a new form.

Finally, he felt something in his mind soothe him.  It told him to sleep, to rest.

He obeyed readily, reasoning that he had had enough torture for a lifetime.

The Wolf stood and shook itself out.  It was twice as large as any wild wolf, and, instead of blunted teeth, every one of his was razor sharp.  His eyes were mustard yellow and glowed with a certain hunger that couldn’t be sated, no matter how much blood ran between his jowls.

He sniffed the air and smelled people.  People who were calm and peaceful.

People who weren’t afraid.

As he stalked toward the lights several  hundred meters away, the Wolf’s lip curled up. 

They weren’t afraid.

They would be.


	2. Welcome to the Pack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scout awakes after his first change in a pile of RED viscera. The BLU Sniper offers his condolences, but not really.

Scout’s entire body hurt.  It wasn’t like he’d been beaten up or even the subtle ache of respawn, it was a lingering soreness like his entire body had been put through the workout of his life.  The air smelled like death and blood, but that was pretty normal in the middle of a battle week.  They didn’t really have the time to scrub the base down between battles, and Scout sure as hell didn’t want to get up from his…

He wasn’t on his bed.

Scout opened his eyes and felt his stomach turn over as he came face to face with half of Soldier’s face.  The other half was… shredded, like he’d been mauled by a bear or something.  Scout licked his lips nervously and tasted blood, dry and disgusting, along his lips and, as he raised his hand to wipe at his mouth, he saw that his hand and arm was caked with the stuff.

He felt his heart thud to a slow, stuttering stop.

 _He’d done this_.

He felt sick.  He pressed his hand to his stomach and the contents— _the contents_ —helped themselves up his throat and onto the floor.  Chunks of red, raw meat, strips of tendon that made him feel like he was choking as they came up, blood… so much blood that Scout felt like he’d never seen so much before.  Something caught in his throat, and he coughed, choking out a chunk of bone.  A humorous, snapped into a piece three inches long.  Bits of half-digested cloth mingled with the bits of upchuck, and Scout shifted back on his little bed of shredded uniforms and bodyparts.  He’d been using someone’s thigh as a pillow.  There were arms and half a gnawed on torso and a few feet and feetless boots surrounding him and he’d knocked over their uniform closet to make a sort of softer nest out of the clothes…

“Holy… fucking…  _shit_.”  Scout whined, curling up on his side and making himself as small as possible.  He heard something outside the door of respawn, and curled tighter.  Whoever it was, they would demand to know what had happened, demand an explanation.

What would he tell them?  What would they think?  He could act like a survivor, then quit saying it was PTSD and… and… what if it happened again?   _What if it happened while he was at home with his family? What if it happened while he was with his mother?_

He felt tears sting his eyes, but kept them closed tightly.  Oh God, if they were gonna kill him, they might as well just… fucking  _do it_  without him seeing it coming.

He heard boots scuff the floor and was tempted to look.  They sounded like Sniper’s, but… his stomach turned again and he jerked out of his little ball of protection to upheave as he remembered the man’s half-devoured torso behind him.

“ ‘Ey, ‘ey, easy there, little mate.”  It  _was_  a Sniper.

Scout felt a hand on his back, rubbing soothingly, gentle, caressing.  He shoved the man away and shook his head.  “Get the fuck away from me, I know what you—“ He knew what Sniper was… and from the look on the man’s face, he knew what Scout was too.  “You fuckin’ did this on purpose, didn’t you?”  He spat, standing and wincing at the pull of the remainder of the elastic from his underwear.  His… leg was rubbed raw in a line where it must have stayed while he’d… been something else.  Larger, more immune to the pain.  Less aware of what he was doing.

“I did.”  Sniper nodded, and he slowly rose, took a careful step over the first pile of vomit and pulled out a pocket knife to help him with the elastic he’d begun to pull at. 

Scout jerked back again, but the Sniper was patient and held no malice in his face.  Eventually he got Scout backed into a corner and knelt to cut the strip free.  Scout kept telling himself that he should punch the man, give him a good beating for doing this to him, but he just stood there, timidly backed into a corner, scared and… Jesus fuck, he was trembling.

“Why…?” he croaked, unaware that he was crying until the enemy Sniper rose and gently took his face in his hands, wiping the tears away and paying no mind to the mud and blood that came away with them.

The Sniper shook his head, like the why didn’t matter, just that he had.

“I’ll help you deal with this… I promise.”  He told Scout, his brown eyes were warm and hard at the same time, and Scout felt compelled to listen to him, to follow him when he began leading him out of the gore strewn respawn and into the showers.

“Why… why didn’t they respawn?”  He asked, his voice too small for his liking.

“They did… the system just couldn’t collect the rest of ‘em what you ate.”  Sniper explained as he helped the younger man clean up.

“Jesus…” Scout’s stomach heaved again, and this time just a trickle of blood and bile came up onto Sniper’s shoes, though the coursing cold water quickly whisked it away.

The growl that left the man’s throat was the same one Scout had always heard when he was frustrated on the field, when he’d gotten the better hand in a fight, or irritated him by clowning around instead of being a professional and getting the job done.  It held a different meaning now, though, and struck a sort of anxious fear in Scout’s heart.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  Scout whined against his will, screwing up his face as the words left his throat in that…  _desperate_  tone.  “ _Fuck_  what’s wrong with me?”

“Instincts.”  Sniper told him, a wry smirk stretching his mouth.  “No matter how much of a foul mouthed twerp you are, you’re gonna think twice about being a foul mouthed twerp to me from now on.”

“No fuckin’ shit.”  Scout hissed, wrinkling his nose.

“Mhm,” Sniper chuckled and turned a little of the hot on as he thrust the washcloth he’d been using on the younger man into his hand.  “I’m gonna go have a smoke.  Finish cleanin’ yourself up and then you’ll head out with my team.”

“What?  Where?”  Scout asked, almost following Sniper out of the showers before he stopped himself.

“Back to HQ, probably… call you a defect and say the rest are dead, request that you get stationed with me at my next post and take a holiday while everything gets set up and a new battleground is selected.”  He shrugged and went ahead, lighting his cigarette and taking a puff.

“You… sound like you’ve done this before.”  Scout told him, scrubbing at his blood caked arm absently.

“Yeah… welcome to the pack.”  Sniper told him with a toothy grin.


End file.
